Had the hand that drew the wavering blue line beneath these words in Milestones really been shaking as it seemed? Was it his father’s hand? Was it some sign, something his father wanted to keep before him at all times? Was it really some precocious and successful attempt at prophecy?
In recent days Fahd had opened the leather satchel, stuffed with documents and diaries, stories and memories, specialist books and picture books, secret pamphlets, pens, the olive stone prayer beads and a picture — how it had been taken and by whom he had no idea — showing his father and fellow inmates in the prison yard. These mementoes of his father had yet to claim his attention, with the exception of the green volume, a black line across the middle of the cover and on the first page a title in thulathi script that read Milestones with the name Sayyid Qutb in beautiful farsi typeface in the top right corner, then the words Dar Dimashq Publishing. The handwriting inside was in his father’s hand, notes in the margins written long ago.
Back then his father, or perhaps just the author, believed that all societies existed in jahiliya, a state of godless ignorance, and were either … atheistic communist societies, pagan societies in India, Japan, the Philippines and Africa, or Christian and Jewish societies that followed their deviant creeds.
Within this definition of jahiliya societies he included those that professed to be Muslim, but in fact submitted to an authority other than God. It was as though the words in the book Fahd leafed through were being uttered by his cousin Yasser. Was this the well from which his father, his uncle and Yasser had all drunk? The common source for all those that followed the call to wage war on society, to the extent that some of them abandoned their normal lives and took up residence in ghettos for their kind?
Haraa Sharqiya on the outskirts of Mecca, the neighbourhood where the families of the Divine Reward Salafist Group lived, was little more than a chaotic assemblage of houses and buildings, between which ran exceptionally narrow alleys like cattle pens, scarcely wide enough for two people to pass at the same time. Their homes were ferro concrete structures with three doors. The rear entrance of each house led directly to the front door of the house behind it, and was commonly used by the women to meet, hold whispered conversations and swap favours and cooking ingredients — they were also the doors through which many of them fled during the raids carried out by the security services shortly before the occupation of the Grand Mosque.
Suleiman al-Safeelawi was brave and reckless, returning at night with rare courage to a neighbourhood under surveillance and making his way inside via the back door that opened on to the whip-thin alleyway, to rescue his bag containing his proofs of identity — his ID documents and certificates from primary and secondary school — before slipping away while the detectives and soldiers stood watch over the front doors.
He could hear his own heart thudding as he crept to the house of the group’s leader, silent as a butterfly as he passed through the darkness to the men’s majlis where he slept at night, to find his bedding folded up as he had left it and beside it his black leather satchel. He picked it up without opening it and, fleeing to the cattle pen behind the house, made his way out of the sprawling district, most of whose modest dwellings housed members of the group — Brothers as they called themselves — along with a few students from the Islamic University.
That moment, back at the time of the second wave of arrests and now sunk in dread and silence and forgetting, did not permanently distance young Suleiman from the group. Even so, he began to attend lessons with the blind sheikh at Imam Mosque in Deira in the company of a young man of a similar age, before being joined by a third student, then a fourth. The group’s military commander sent a messenger to warn against keeping company with government sheikhs lest they draw attention to themselves, unaware that the young men had grown impatient with the group and its impetuosity. Nevertheless, when Suleiman met Mushabbab that afternoon outside the Kutub Watania publishing house he almost flew with joy to learn that the leader was asking after him and expected him to arrive on the tenth of Ramadan; joy, because the leader’s eye only singled people out if he had confidence in them, when their abilities and talents set them apart from the rest.
So Suleiman travelled to see him at a farm in the village of Ammar, west of Riyadh, where some of the Brothers were gathered. The leader took him by the hand and led him to a long narrow room like a corridor and showed him the red string onion bags packed with yellow pamphlets that bore the title of his first message to the umma: Correcting Confusion over the Faith of he whom God Has Made Imam over All People. It was only once Suleiman had driven the bags to their destination that he actually read the contents of this message, at a little house in Mecca, where the leader of the Meccan Brothers, entrusted with handing out the pamphlets in the Grand Mosque, was staying. It was the night of the twenty-seventh of Ramadan.
That first message, sent fluttering into the skies over Mecca, Riyadh, Ta’if and Qaseem by Suleiman and his zealous companions, made reference to part of a prophetic hadith that contained the following saying of the Prophet, upon him be the blessings and peace of God: ‘The religion of God shall only be established by he who is secured on all sides.’
Or, as the pamphlet explained: The story of this hadith, for whose sake we have come to divide ourselves into groups, is that the need to keep aloof from those who deny the oneness of God, to expose their enmity and cleave to the truth, was seen by some as an embarrassment and a hardship, an obstacle to spreading the faith that repelled the common people. Some were lax in applying this principle, while others abandoned it entirely. But we say that it is not as they believed, for God has lifted the embarrassment from us and adjured us to this principle, for if there were any embarrassment in it he would not have so commanded us. Listen to His exalted words:
‘And strive in His cause as you ought to strive. He has chosen you, and has imposed no difficulties on you in religion; it is the faith of your father, Abraham. It is He who named you Muslims, both before and in this revelation; that the Messenger may be a witness for you.’
If God Himself has commanded us to strive and made it clear to us that there is no embarrassment in it, and that this is the faith of Abraham, then know that adherence to this principle — striving and following the faith of Abraham — is what sets the true Muslim apart from the pretender.
And so in their eyes all people were pretenders and hypocrites, and it was their duty to exhort them, unembarrassed, to wash their hands of those who denied God’s oneness, for if they did not, they were of them. The faith was not to be established through sycophancy and silence but by cleaving to the truth and forbearance in the face of suffering.
The initial wave of arrests sent Suleiman fleeing into the desert in the company of the group’s leader, the two of them wandering the wastes for two weeks living on lizards captured in their burrows. Forty days later, after most of the group’s members had been released from prison and after the second wave of arrests prior to the assault on the Grand Mosque, Suleiman decided that things were now in deadly earnest. No longer was this a matter of a pellet gun puncturing the heart of a loudspeaker, as his brother had done in Muraidasiya, nor was it a handful of boys demonstrating outside the governor’s palace in Buraida. It had gone beyond mere jail terms: they now faced execution by the sword.